"The first bet that I ever put down on a horse race," said a horse owner and trainer at an uptown cafÉ the other night, "was on a horse that stood at 100 to 1 in the betting. It was also the first race I ever saw run by thoroughbreds. I was clerking in a Long Island City grocery store for $8 a week at the time, and I didn't know a race-horse from a ton of coal. I got a couple of my fingers crushed between two salt fish boxes one morning, and I had to lay off from work. I didn't want to hang around my room, and didn't know what to do with myself, and so when a no-account young fellow I knew suggested that I go over with him to Monmouth Park and have a look at the races, I fell in with the proposition. Besides the remains of my previous week's pay, about $3, I had $20 saved up out of my wages, and I kept this in one $20 note in my inside vest pocket. After paying for round-trip tickets for my friend and myself, and for two tickets of admission to the race grounds, I was practically broke with the exception of a few cents, for I didn't count the $20 as available assets. I intended to hang on to that unbroken. Well, I found that all my sporty friend wanted of me was to have me pay his way on the train and into the grounds, for he promptly lost me as soon as we got by the gate. I felt pretty sore at this treatment, not that I wanted his help, for I hadn't the least idea of doing any betting with my savings, but I didn't cotton to the notion of being played for a good thing and then thrown that way.

"I walked around among the crowd with my hands in my pockets, wondering a good deal over the dope talk of the ducks that knew all about the horses and their preferred weights, distances, riders, and so on; it was all Greek to me then. Finally I was shouldered and jostled into the betting ring. It wasn't long before I began to rubberneck at the prices laid against the horses on the bookies' blackboards. Although I didn't know anything about the nags then, I found out afterward, when I had made a study of the game and got a little next to it, that this race I made my first bet on was composed of a cheap mess of fourteen selling platers. They were at all kinds of prices, from 4 to 5 on to 100 to 1 against. The latter price was laid about three of 'em. I didn't exactly understand what the 100 to 1 meant, and so I asked a fellow standing near by to explain it. He looked me over out of the slants of his lamps, thinking, probably, that I was stringing him. When he saw that I was a green one he told me that the 100 to 1 meant that if a 100 to 1 shot won that I had put a dollar on I'd be $100 ahead of the game. This looked pretty good to me. I didn't know anything about horse form or horse quality then, and I thought that one of 'em had just as much chance as another to win. So I picked out the 100 to 1 shot whose name I liked best and elbowed my way up to a booky's stand to put a dollar down on it, holding my $20 bill tightly gripped in my hand. I passed the twenty up to the bookmaker—he went broke, and has been a dead 'un for a good many years now—and said:

"'Give me a dollar's worth of that fourth horse from the top—that one with the 100 to 1 chalked before his name.'

"The booky looked down at me contemptuously, without accepting the twenty I proffered him, and said:

"'I don't want no dollar bets.'

"Well, this made me feel pretty cheap, especially as all of the ducks back of me, waiting to pass up their fifties and hundreds gave me the laugh. I didn't like to be shown up in that public way. I was just as sore at that time about being made to look like thirty cents as I am to-day. So I did a bit of lightning thinking. 'Twenty's a big bunch to me,' I thought, 'and I've had to hop out of bed at half past 3 in the morning to go to meat market a good many times to get it together; but I'll be hanged if I'm going to let this fellow get away with his idea of making me look small, even if I haven't got a show on earth.' So I passed the bill up to him again, saying:

"'All right, there, billionaire. Just gimme $20 worth of that fourth horse from the top, with 100 to 1 chalked before his name.'

"I was chagrined to find that this strong play didn't help me a little bit. The booky only grinned as he chanted, 'Two thousand dollars to $20 on the fourth one from the top,' and the chap that wrote me the ticket grinned back at him, and the crowd behind me again gave me the hoarse hoot, loud and long continued. I'll bet I was blushing on the bottom of my feet when I snatched the ticket and hurried away from that booky's stall, with the chuckles of the hot-looking members ringing in my ears. Well, my horse walked in.

"When I went to cash my ticket for $2,020 the booky sized me up, with all kinds of wrath in his eyes.

"'A good make-up you've got for a Rube,' he said to me. 'You're good. That's the most scientific commissioner act I've seen pulled off up to date, and I've been at this game ever since Hickory Jim was a two-year-old.'

"I didn't know what he was talking about. The word commissioner was particularly mysterious to me, but I wasn't going to let him put it on me again, and I like to have drove him crazy with the slow grin I gave him. He chucked the bundle of $2,020 at me, and I just walked backward with it in my hands and grinning at him. He was the maddest-looking man I ever saw, before or since. I didn't go back to my grocery job, nor did I hop in and slough off my $2,000 on a game I didn't know anything about. I didn't play another horse that year, but went in and made a study of the game, going to the tracks every day to see 'em run and to think the whole institution over. It has taken me all of the years that have passed since to find out that the study of horse racing don't amount to a row of spuds, that study doesn't beat the game. I simply had a series of lucky plays after I figured it that I knew all there was to be learned about horse racing, and those plays put me on the velvet I've had to a greater or less extent ever since. I don't often play them now—I've got a fairly nifty string, and I run 'em and let the other fellows do the guessing.

"What set me to thinking about this first play of mine was a letter I received the other day from an owner, who's racing his string down at New Orleans, about the win of that plug Covington, Ky., the other day. The price laid against Covington, Ky., was at first 150 to 1, and the rail birds in the know battered it down to 60 to 1 at post time, throwing all kinds of misery into the layers when the plater romped in, after being practically left at the post. My friend says in his letter that a big bookmaker declined to take a dollar bet from one of the wise rail birds on Covington, Ky., at 150 to 1, and that the young fellow got chesty, dug into the pocket where he kept his silver, found $2 in quarters and halves, and handed the $3 to the bookie on Covington, Ky., to win. The layer took the money and it cost him $450. The bookie, my friend writes me, has been poked in the ribs over the thing by his fellow-layers ever since.

"I don't often pay any attention to good things," continued the turfman, "and it's rarer still that I am compelled to regret my indifference to the bottled-up cinches, but, in common with about 3,000 other people, I overlooked a proposition at Lakeside last fall that caused me several minutes' hard thinking. I didn't lose any money over it, but it's hard to think of the inside chance I neglected on that occasion to make an old-fashioned hog killing. I had four or five of my three-year-olds out at Lakeside and was pulling a purse down with 'em once in a while, and depending on the purses to keep me even with the game and strong for hay money. I wasn't doing any betting; I took my confirmed indifference to good things along with me to Chicago, and I think now, looking back at the season, that I made a bit of a mistake in doing so, for if there's any place in the country outside of the outlaw tracks where good things do have a habit of going through right often, then that place is Chicago. I didn't profit by any of 'em that were made to stick last fall, however, although I saw many a sure thing soaked down from 20 to 1 to 4 to 1 at post time, and then come in romping with all the money. A lot of men I knew out at Lakeside—fellows with small strings, none of which ever won or got in the money—were on all kinds of velvet by giving ear to the inside good things, but they didn't make me jealous a little bit. I'm in the game for keeps, and that's more than can be said for the good-thing players.

"Anyhow, for all that, I'm still regretting that I overlooked this chance I'm speaking of. I was in a Dearborn street hang-out for racing men one night, along toward the wind-up of the racing season, when a boy came inside and told me a man out at the front door wanted to see me. I went out and found a drunken stable hand waiting for me. He was employed as a general stable roustabout by the owner of a California string, and I had befriended the man in the paddock a few days before when he was engaged in a rum fight with another stable hand. He was getting the worst of the scrap when I stepped in and pulled his antagonist off of him. It didn't amount to anything, this, but the tank stable hand that was waiting for me outside of the Dearborn street place in the rain seemed to feel grateful to me for it.

"'Hello, Bill,' said I to him, 'what's up?'

"'Got fired this afternoon,' he replied.

"'Broke?' I asked him.

"'I didn't hunt you up to touch you, boss,' he said. 'I got a good thing I want to give to you. You've been square to me. The good thing's to come off to-morrow, and nobody's on. I'm preaching on it because I've been dropped from the track just for getting a skate on, and because I want to put you next, that's been on the level with me.'

"'You can pass me up,' I told the man. 'I don't play the sure ones, you know.'

"'But this is ripe, and it's going to happen,' persisted the man. 'It's a baby. It's a looloo. It's a cachuca. It's that filly Mazie V. in the two-year-old race to-morrow. You know who's stable she belongs in. I heard the chaw about it this afternoon before I got fired, and they didn't get on to it that I was listening. Mazie V.'s going to walk in to-morrow. No dope, but she's fit. She worked three-quarters in .15 flat early yesterday morning when nobody was looking, and she's on edge. They're going to burn up the books with it. I know that nobody can tout you, and I'm not trying to tout you. But here's a chance, and I came down to let you know.'

"Well, of course I had to thank the man, but I couldn't help but grin at him at that.

"'How long have you been rubbing 'em down?' I asked him.

"'I've been around the horses since I was ten years old,' he replied.

"'And still so easy?' I couldn't help but say. 'Well, I won't say anything of what you've told me so as to queer the price, if there's any play on Mazie V., but, of course, as for myself, I pass it up; thanks all the same to you. Need any money?'

"No, he didn't want any money, he said. He had simply hunted me up to put me on to one of the best things of the meeting, and he shambled off.

"When the books opened for that two-year-old race the next day, Mazie V., a clean-limbed filly that had never shown a particle of class, opened up the rank outsider in a big field, which included some very fairish two-year-olds. I looked the books over, not because I was betting, but just out of habit, and I saw that every nag in the race was being played but Mazie V., the 150 to 1 shot.

"'If they're going to burn the bookies out on Mazie V., I thought, amusedly, 'it's a wonder the stable connections don't take some of this good 150 to 1.'

"As I was thinking this over, the ex-stableman who had hunted me up with the Mazie V. good thing the night before plucked me by the sleeve. He was several times as drunk as an owl, and I didn't care to talk with him.

"'Are you down?' he asked me, lurching. 'Because 'f you ain't, you're campin' out, an' that's all there is to it.'

"'Go and take a sleep,' I told him, and passed on. But he didn't want any sleep. Instead, he drunkenly mounted a box that he found in the betting ring, and started to make an address to the hustling bettors.

"'Hey!' he shouted, 'if you mugs want to git aboard for the barbecue, play Mazie V. She's going to be cut loose. She's a 1 to 10 chance. She's going through. It's a cinch.'

"The crowd guyed him.

"'It's so good,' shouted the poor devil, 'that I just put the last $8 I got on earth on her to win—not to show, but to win. Hey! I'm not touting. I'm trying to give you all a win-out chance. You needn't think because I ain't togged out that I'm a dead one on this. Even if I have got a load along, why'——

"Just then somebody, probably an interested party, kicked the box from under the man and he went sprawling. That closed him up. The crowd roared, but not a man in the gang, of course, put down a dollar on Mazie V. If any of the pikers had even a dream of doing such a thing the stable hand's drunken recommendation of the filly switched them off. Just before the horses went to the post the $5 bills of people that weren't pikers, but stable connections, went into the ring in such quantities on Mazie V. that she closed at 100 to 1 in a few of the books, and at much smaller figures in most of the others.

"Well, the way that little filly Mazie V. put it all over her field was something ridiculous. The race was something easy for her. There was nothing to it but Mazie V. She got away from the post almost dead last, and then picked up her horses at leisure, revelling in the heavy going, and, loping up in the last sixteenth, walked in with daylight between her and the favorite. It was one of the killings of the Chicago racing season, and the books were soaked to over $20,000 on $5 bets.

"'That certainly is hard money to lose, to say the least,' I heard poor Mike Dwyer mumble on the day that he took 1 to 15 on Hanover, putting down $45,000 to win $3,000, and Hanover got himself disgracefully beaten by Laggard. And that's what I think about that Mazie V. good thing—hard money not to have won."